How To Generate Ideas Through Meetings

As the boss of your company,you’re responsible to ensure there is a thriving culture at the office that encourages the creation of novel ideas. These ideas could help solve internal problems.

They might help solve issues faced by your customers. Below are some tips on how you create wonderful and innovative ideas, through making use of your most valuable asset – your employees.

Importance Of Planning A Meeting

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The best way to generate ideas is through a meeting. However, it’s what you do before the workshop that will determine how successful it is. Have a clear idea in your mind why you need new ideas. Is it to help make an internal process more efficient? Is it to help create a new product? Create a format for the meeting, which is broken down into timed blocks of activities. This will help you to run it efficiently. Once you have done this, prepare a brief to send to your employees. Arrange a future date for your meeting. Select 5 employees you want at the session and send them an invite.

The Boss’s Role At The Meeting

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At the beginning of the meeting, give a brief overview of the problem that needs new ideas created for it. After this, go over the format of the meeting and explain the activities, which the employees will do, to come up with new ideas. A quick 5-minute introduction is all that is needed. Encourage your employees to let go of all judgements and be as creative as possible. Explain that at this stage every idea is a good one.

The Employee’s Role In The Meeting

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It’s the role of your employees to generate as many ideas as they can as solutions to the problem. In order to do this, they can spend 10 minutes coming up with ideas individually, writing every idea on a separate piece of sticky paper.

Review The Ideas

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After the 10 minutes are up, as the boss, invite each of your employees to stand up, stick their ideas on a wall and spend a few minutes briefly describing each one.This activity can be done in 20 minutes.

Select Ideas For Further Exploration

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After every employee has had a chance to explain each of their ideas, ask each person to select their favourite two ideas generated amongst the entire group. If any ideas are selected twice by two employees, then ask one of them to select another idea. This will now result in a potential list of 10 different ideas. Make a list of these 10 ideas on a board.

Future Actions

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Request each employee to go away, do a little research and write a brief paragraph on each of their two favourite ideas. You can then collate all the paragraphs and do further work on selecting the best idea to solve the problem at hand.